All the quotes

A recent study which compared Miami, where there is no needle exchange program, with San Francisco, which has numerous needle exchange programs, found that there were eight times more discarded used syringes on the streets of Miami even though Miami has only half as many injection drug users as San Francisco.

Maybe I don’t want you to be injecting drugs, maybe I don’t want you to put your life at risk. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t accept that that’s what you’re doing with compassion, and then see how I can possibly be helpful to you.

While 1571 people died from a heroin overdose in the UK in 2015, no one has ever died from an overdose in a SIF anywhere – despite the many thousands of overdoses that have occurred in them. Opiate overdose is easily reversed if attended to quickly, only becoming deadly if people don’t have rapid access to emergency care.

A coffee cup — we don’t think about coffee cups, but it’s much more interesting than one might think — a coffee cup is a device, which has a container and a handle. The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid. Why is that important? Well, it enables you to drink coffee. But also, by the way, the coffee is hot, the liquid is sterile; you’re not likely to get cholera that way. So the coffee cup, or the cup with a handle, is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health.

“Everyone makes mistakes. But some are considered only mistakes, while others are seen as evidence of moral depravity, weakness or inferiority. And many think that such people need saving”….” Cyndee Clay disagrees. “We don’t need to rescue or save people,” she says. “We only need to provide resources so that people can handle their own business.”

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The people behind this site

Nigel Brunsdon

Nigel’s day job is being the Community Manager at HIT, he also runs the injectingadvice.com website and a number of other online harm reduction projects. In his spare time he can be found hiding behind a camera.

Craig Harvey

Craig is a committed harm reductionist, having worked primarily with people who inject drugs for two decades, both in the United Kingdom and Australia. A surfer, climber and wannabe novelist, he sometimes takes photographs too.